Maybe I'm just turning into a conspiracy theorist, but this looks like it's trying to get people to waste more fuel, and possibly support drilling in more places, such as the oft-contested ANWR.
I don't understand why the US government seems to be so intent on getting people to continue using lots of energy (/me says as he sits in an air-conditioned apartment with numerous computers running constantly..). Okay, I do know -- damn near everyone in the administration came from an oil company. Bush, Cheney, hell, even Condoleeza Rice..
Anyway.. Conserving just a little here and there can do quite a bit, especially since folks here in the US already use the most energy per capita.
I agree with the other comments. Plant a tree (or ten, or a hundred..) Get a slightly smaller car, or at least one with a better engine/transmission. Support biodiesel or other renewable energy sources.
Also, the article doesn't appear to say you can make fuel out of the carbon dioxide -- they just found another way to get a supply for people who already use it (the big one being oil refineries).. So, okay, it allows you to re-use CO2 that gets into the air, rather than just leaving it there. Still, I think trees are probably more efficient at it than this idea (an unscientific quick glance at it, unfortunately).
Somehow, this article just seems to be misplaced optimism..
I suppose this could be useful on systems that can do suspend-to-RAM, like laptops. Such systems still need a trickle of energy from the batteries to keep the data stored in memory from decaying.
Also, a system with persistent memory would be like the old mainframe and minicomputers that had core memory. In the event of a crash, the memory could be examined. I suppose this could be somewhat beneficial to operating system developers..
Heh. Reminds me that there have been people who have hooked up LEDs to devices with electrical S/P-DIFs so that they could communicate with other devices that had optical inputs. For example, this could be used to send out data from a sound card to a minidisc recorder. The bitrates there are pretty high -- I think the high end of those transmissions gets up to 2Mbps or so, though most data probably only flows at less than 1Mbps..
Okay, not as interesting as your story, but it just shows that LEDs have some unexpected uses..
Well, I must say that at larger sizes, I much prefer the original `hinted' text, since it shows up much darker on my display. However, the non-hinted text seems to be much more legible at smaller sizes, and it definitely scales much more cleanly (no jumping from everything being ~1 pixel wide to everything being ~2 pixels).
If the non-hinted text could be made darker, that would be great! Of course, I hear that the hinting engine is getting better and better, so who knows what will be the best a year from now..
From all I've heard, PCI devices (and their drivers) are supposed to be able to handle IRQ sharing. Now, it doesn't work when there are ISA devices (serial ports, floppy controllers, etc) trying to share IRQs..
I wonder if there's a different problem, such as IRQs being set to `edge' instead of `level' in the BIOS?
And, well, I hate to be an ass, but doesn't Linux handle this just fine?
It's really hard to say how things will play out.. Most CS students here at UMN have programmed on Unix, Windows, and Mac (okay, the Mac was just m68k assembly, but whatever). I've done assembly, C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and Scheme (how could I forget Scheme!). I've avoided Windows systems personally, but most of my friends have at least done some Visual Basic work.
I definitely don't think it's appropriate to box students in and only let them use one platform, ever, though there is a strong push here that software must run on the Solaris systems. Of course, since the languages we use most of the time are cross-platform, it's usually possible to do most of your development on your favorite platform, then twiddle a few things to get it to work on the lab machines.
I personally wish that the labs used Linux machines, but that's just my own pet peeve. I figure in the grand scheme of things, this is probably the way to go..
I dunno, I may have clicked through on ads on Slashdot a handful of times, and most of those were just going to sites that are part of OSDN (like ThinkGeek).
I put in $5, we'll see how long that lasts. Hell, that's like a 12-pack of Mountain Dew around here, so it's not a big deal to me.
Yeah, but the Internet Explorer bundling issue was just one small part of the case. The media focused on that, and it is now a fairly irrelevant part of the case (I think the DoJ and states aren't even pursuing that part of the case anymore).
Yeah, back when it was known as the NetShow player (this was back in 1997 or 1998). It was released shortly after Microsoft acquired another company that had made a cross-platform player. MS had said that they would release another version, but it never happened.
I used it a few times, mostly to play the.asf video of Win98 crashing for Bill Gates at a computer conference..
Lotus notes server runs fine on Linux and the Notes client works fine through Wine. Of course, getting the code would make the notes client run better, but it still runs today nonetheless.
I've found it interesting how patents and other `intellectual property' tend to get pooled by a handful of major companies. This, my friends, is how standards really get made these days. Heck, similar practices date back a hundred years or more.
This is really annoying to me, as these companies kind of turn the idea of a patent on it's back. Sure, they defend them from the man on the street til the cows come home, but then they collude with other big companies. Am I the only one that thinks this is backward?
criticizing the gov't..
on
Collateral Damage
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I haven't seen Collateral Damage, and I suppose I probably won't, but I really think you may be coming to a harsher view of it than you should. The United States has made many mistakes in the past. It's entirely inappropriate to paint the US as a white knight, always battling for good in the face of evil because it's untrue. I wish that was the case, but it's not.
Theodore Roosevelt once stated that he believed it was treasonous to not criticize the actions of the President. The public should be trying to hold the government to the highest standards right now. It's a really uphill battle, though..
It's amazing, looking back at the creations our TV and movie industries have come up with in the last decade. Terrorism has been a major theme. Even The Lone Gunmen on Fox had an episode involving diverting a plane that would have crashed into one of the WTC towers. Many movies that would have come out last fall have been delayed or canned.
I worry a lot about the restrictions that may be put on TV and movies in the future, both in written laws and in unspoken agreements. I understand that Back to the Future was edited by TBS, TNT, and NBC to reduce the role of the Libyan terrorists that `Doc' Brown stole plutonium from. I think it's ludicrous! What's going to be edited next?
Looking at Black Hawk Down, I think the real tragedy comes from putting people in a situation they shouldn't have been in in the first place. To me, a member of the public, the action in Somalia was billed as a humanitarian mission. The reality is apparently different, though I don't know if even the troops involved knew anything about that.
I think it's another example of how open and truthful communication is important. When true motives are hidden, good people get themselves into bad situations.
I've seen a lot of things get hidden in the post-9/11 world, so it's been hard for me to believe anything anymore. I avoid the news coverage of our little `war'.. At the moment, I'm taking time to work on figuring out my own life. The people near me have much less incentive to lie to me than the figureheads in government..
I hope that I'll soon find some energy to try and help out in society. I think the community of Linux and other open source developers have seen the value of open communication, even if it occasionally degenerates into silly bickering. It's probably a good idea to get involved in the political process this year, even if it's just at a low level..
Re:I hate to rain on Mr Cringely's parade, but...
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 2
*shrug* I really doubt the FCC is going to worry too much about 2.4GHz stuff. It's a largely unregulated band. So many devices use that frequency range, so some really bad things would happen if it changed.
However, the FCC still has restrictions. I think there's a limit to how much transmitting power you can use (or, at least, a limit to how much is detectable a certain distance away).
Other than placing a repeater on property that is not his own, I don't see anything wrong here. Cringely is just pretending that he's sitting downtown at a coffee shop. He's paying for the bandwidth he's using.
Anyway, I think 802.11 is a very liberating technology. Provided that people who set up such networks follow some sort of standard (which probably hasn't been built yet, but it probably will be before too long), this could really be a big step in the evolution of the Internet.
For the last several years, it's been commercialized to the extreme. There are people who just want to use it to connect to others, and experiment with the technology.
Oh well, I suppose I'm just an idealistic bastard...
From Sun's point of view, they are probably looking for a smooth way to transition SPARC Solaris to SPARC Linux, so as to drop Solaris entirely as a cost-cutting measure. Sun needs either a huge boost in SPARC CPU performance or lower pricing, preferrably both. Otherwise they will get killed by high-end X86 systems.
That's interesting.. By no means do I have an inside view into Sun or anything, but from what I've seen, they've been arrogantly avoiding that idea. We run Linux on an older Ultra 30 box at work (our Amanda backup server), and I find it to be much easier to manage than the Solaris boxes we have.
I remember when I started working with Solaris systems.. So many things were missing from the OS (well, from my longtime Linux user perspective). Sun is, perhaps rightly, concerned about having databases and web servers running efficiently on their operating system, but they haven't made it any easier to use. I suppose that changes a bit with Gnome coming with the OS, but we'll see.
I'd really like to see them support Linux on their lower-end Sparc hardware more (ie, the 8 processor market). Looks like they might make me a bit happier by supporting some management software for their StorEgde RAID arrays (very cool..)
I guess it's not Sun I should really be worrying about, though. Many organizations that run Solaris/Sparc systems have proprietary software that generally isn't available for Linux/Sparc.
We were going to try to move one of our bigger servers to Linux, but we just couldn't get software.
The number of ads has kept going up and up. I don't know about you guys, but it just makes me flip channels more. It makes for distracting TV watching, since I end up surfing for something new every commercial break.
It all seems backward to me. Destroying documents to get rid of any evidence of accountability.. What's up with that?
Certainly, there's a lot of stuff that isn't bad, but it can be viewed as bad in the context of history.. Lawrence Lessig got in trouble when he was appointed as Special Master in the Microsoft case because of an e-mail he wrote regarding the ease of installation (or lack thereof) of Netscape versus Internet Explorer, and the trouble installing the software caused..
It was just a silly e-mail to a friend, but it got blown out of proportion.
On the other hand, there have been instances in the past of very important and incriminating documents being kept by employees who felt that twinge of conscience and decided they shouldn't go in the shredder.
Document retention policies, in my opinion, should be based around keeping `important' documents (however that is defined), and shredding the lesser ones, in order to save space. No need to keep the e-mail regarding today's lunch outing, but it's a good idea to keep that list of patients...
Unfortunately, I think the way that the law goes, the comments will be published, but they will largely be summarized for the judge in the case. The judge doesn't even have to read the summary (from what I've heard, only Thomas Penfield Jackson has read the summary and comments in the past), but you're right about the comments being published.
If it turns out that the comments were not read by the judge, yet they were really good (as determined by people who read them in the Federal Register), I'm sure the case will take another interesting turn...
May as well post the comments I wrote back in December.. I never put them up anywhere -- I figured others would have much better comments than me. I'm sure there are, but the style I wrote mine in is different from what I've seen other post. Maybe some folks will get some new ideas..
Hey, I just tried updating my system through Windows Update. I wasn't prompted for anything, and I haven't updated my NT 4 box for about a week. Does this mean that I already got the patch a week ago, or has Microsoft not put it on Windows Update yet?
If it's just not in Windows Update, shame on MS. That is the only place I go for updates. I don't waste my time wading through all of the other crap on MS's website.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just turning into a conspiracy theorist, but this looks like it's trying to get people to waste more fuel, and possibly support drilling in more places, such as the oft-contested ANWR.
I don't understand why the US government seems to be so intent on getting people to continue using lots of energy (/me says as he sits in an air-conditioned apartment with numerous computers running constantly..). Okay, I do know -- damn near everyone in the administration came from an oil company. Bush, Cheney, hell, even Condoleeza Rice..
Anyway.. Conserving just a little here and there can do quite a bit, especially since folks here in the US already use the most energy per capita.
I agree with the other comments. Plant a tree (or ten, or a hundred..) Get a slightly smaller car, or at least one with a better engine/transmission. Support biodiesel or other renewable energy sources.
Also, the article doesn't appear to say you can make fuel out of the carbon dioxide -- they just found another way to get a supply for people who already use it (the big one being oil refineries).. So, okay, it allows you to re-use CO2 that gets into the air, rather than just leaving it there. Still, I think trees are probably more efficient at it than this idea (an unscientific quick glance at it, unfortunately).
Somehow, this article just seems to be misplaced optimism..
I suppose this could be useful on systems that can do suspend-to-RAM, like laptops. Such systems still need a trickle of energy from the batteries to keep the data stored in memory from decaying.
Also, a system with persistent memory would be like the old mainframe and minicomputers that had core memory. In the event of a crash, the memory could be examined. I suppose this could be somewhat beneficial to operating system developers..
1939 is also why the Marshall Plan was implemented after WWII ended.
Heh. Reminds me that there have been people who have hooked up LEDs to devices with electrical S/P-DIFs so that they could communicate with other devices that had optical inputs. For example, this could be used to send out data from a sound card to a minidisc recorder. The bitrates there are pretty high -- I think the high end of those transmissions gets up to 2Mbps or so, though most data probably only flows at less than 1Mbps..
Okay, not as interesting as your story, but it just shows that LEDs have some unexpected uses..
Well, I must say that at larger sizes, I much prefer the original `hinted' text, since it shows up much darker on my display. However, the non-hinted text seems to be much more legible at smaller sizes, and it definitely scales much more cleanly (no jumping from everything being ~1 pixel wide to everything being ~2 pixels).
If the non-hinted text could be made darker, that would be great! Of course, I hear that the hinting engine is getting better and better, so who knows what will be the best a year from now..
From all I've heard, PCI devices (and their drivers) are supposed to be able to handle IRQ sharing. Now, it doesn't work when there are ISA devices (serial ports, floppy controllers, etc) trying to share IRQs..
I wonder if there's a different problem, such as IRQs being set to `edge' instead of `level' in the BIOS?
And, well, I hate to be an ass, but doesn't Linux handle this just fine?
It's really hard to say how things will play out.. Most CS students here at UMN have programmed on Unix, Windows, and Mac (okay, the Mac was just m68k assembly, but whatever). I've done assembly, C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and Scheme (how could I forget Scheme!). I've avoided Windows systems personally, but most of my friends have at least done some Visual Basic work.
I definitely don't think it's appropriate to box students in and only let them use one platform, ever, though there is a strong push here that software must run on the Solaris systems. Of course, since the languages we use most of the time are cross-platform, it's usually possible to do most of your development on your favorite platform, then twiddle a few things to get it to work on the lab machines.
I personally wish that the labs used Linux machines, but that's just my own pet peeve. I figure in the grand scheme of things, this is probably the way to go..
Yay! Now I should be able to get this stuff from the nearby and really fast mirror on campus. Ahh..
Now, I just wonder if the FreeS/WAN folks will ever get their code integrated with the standard Linux kernel..
I dunno, I may have clicked through on ads on Slashdot a handful of times, and most of those were just going to sites that are part of OSDN (like ThinkGeek).
I put in $5, we'll see how long that lasts. Hell, that's like a 12-pack of Mountain Dew around here, so it's not a big deal to me.
Yeah, but the Internet Explorer bundling issue was just one small part of the case. The media focused on that, and it is now a fairly irrelevant part of the case (I think the DoJ and states aren't even pursuing that part of the case anymore).
Oh, whee. Showtime. I think that requires digital cable around here. Like I need to deal with set-top boxes..
Yeah, back when it was known as the NetShow player (this was back in 1997 or 1998). It was released shortly after Microsoft acquired another company that had made a cross-platform player. MS had said that they would release another version, but it never happened.
.asf video of Win98 crashing for Bill Gates at a computer conference..
I used it a few times, mostly to play the
Lotus notes server runs fine on Linux and the Notes client works fine through Wine. Of course, getting the code would make the notes client run better, but it still runs today nonetheless.
I've found it interesting how patents and other `intellectual property' tend to get pooled by a handful of major companies. This, my friends, is how standards really get made these days. Heck, similar practices date back a hundred years or more.
This is really annoying to me, as these companies kind of turn the idea of a patent on it's back. Sure, they defend them from the man on the street til the cows come home, but then they collude with other big companies. Am I the only one that thinks this is backward?
I haven't seen Collateral Damage, and I suppose I probably won't, but I really think you may be coming to a harsher view of it than you should. The United States has made many mistakes in the past. It's entirely inappropriate to paint the US as a white knight, always battling for good in the face of evil because it's untrue. I wish that was the case, but it's not.
Theodore Roosevelt once stated that he believed it was treasonous to not criticize the actions of the President. The public should be trying to hold the government to the highest standards right now. It's a really uphill battle, though..
It's amazing, looking back at the creations our TV and movie industries have come up with in the last decade. Terrorism has been a major theme. Even The Lone Gunmen on Fox had an episode involving diverting a plane that would have crashed into one of the WTC towers. Many movies that would have come out last fall have been delayed or canned.
I worry a lot about the restrictions that may be put on TV and movies in the future, both in written laws and in unspoken agreements. I understand that Back to the Future was edited by TBS, TNT, and NBC to reduce the role of the Libyan terrorists that `Doc' Brown stole plutonium from. I think it's ludicrous! What's going to be edited next?
Looking at Black Hawk Down, I think the real tragedy comes from putting people in a situation they shouldn't have been in in the first place. To me, a member of the public, the action in Somalia was billed as a humanitarian mission. The reality is apparently different, though I don't know if even the troops involved knew anything about that.
I think it's another example of how open and truthful communication is important. When true motives are hidden, good people get themselves into bad situations.
I've seen a lot of things get hidden in the post-9/11 world, so it's been hard for me to believe anything anymore. I avoid the news coverage of our little `war'.. At the moment, I'm taking time to work on figuring out my own life. The people near me have much less incentive to lie to me than the figureheads in government..
I hope that I'll soon find some energy to try and help out in society. I think the community of Linux and other open source developers have seen the value of open communication, even if it occasionally degenerates into silly bickering. It's probably a good idea to get involved in the political process this year, even if it's just at a low level..
*shrug* I really doubt the FCC is going to worry too much about 2.4GHz stuff. It's a largely unregulated band. So many devices use that frequency range, so some really bad things would happen if it changed.
However, the FCC still has restrictions. I think there's a limit to how much transmitting power you can use (or, at least, a limit to how much is detectable a certain distance away).
Other than placing a repeater on property that is not his own, I don't see anything wrong here. Cringely is just pretending that he's sitting downtown at a coffee shop. He's paying for the bandwidth he's using.
Anyway, I think 802.11 is a very liberating technology. Provided that people who set up such networks follow some sort of standard (which probably hasn't been built yet, but it probably will be before too long), this could really be a big step in the evolution of the Internet.
For the last several years, it's been commercialized to the extreme. There are people who just want to use it to connect to others, and experiment with the technology.
Oh well, I suppose I'm just an idealistic bastard...
That's interesting.. By no means do I have an inside view into Sun or anything, but from what I've seen, they've been arrogantly avoiding that idea. We run Linux on an older Ultra 30 box at work (our Amanda backup server), and I find it to be much easier to manage than the Solaris boxes we have.
I remember when I started working with Solaris systems.. So many things were missing from the OS (well, from my longtime Linux user perspective). Sun is, perhaps rightly, concerned about having databases and web servers running efficiently on their operating system, but they haven't made it any easier to use. I suppose that changes a bit with Gnome coming with the OS, but we'll see.
I'd really like to see them support Linux on their lower-end Sparc hardware more (ie, the 8 processor market). Looks like they might make me a bit happier by supporting some management software for their StorEgde RAID arrays (very cool..)
I guess it's not Sun I should really be worrying about, though. Many organizations that run Solaris/Sparc systems have proprietary software that generally isn't available for Linux/Sparc.
We were going to try to move one of our bigger servers to Linux, but we just couldn't get software.
The number of ads has kept going up and up. I don't know about you guys, but it just makes me flip channels more. It makes for distracting TV watching, since I end up surfing for something new every commercial break.
It all seems backward to me. Destroying documents to get rid of any evidence of accountability.. What's up with that?
Certainly, there's a lot of stuff that isn't bad, but it can be viewed as bad in the context of history.. Lawrence Lessig got in trouble when he was appointed as Special Master in the Microsoft case because of an e-mail he wrote regarding the ease of installation (or lack thereof) of Netscape versus Internet Explorer, and the trouble installing the software caused..
It was just a silly e-mail to a friend, but it got blown out of proportion.
On the other hand, there have been instances in the past of very important and incriminating documents being kept by employees who felt that twinge of conscience and decided they shouldn't go in the shredder.
Document retention policies, in my opinion, should be based around keeping `important' documents (however that is defined), and shredding the lesser ones, in order to save space. No need to keep the e-mail regarding today's lunch outing, but it's a good idea to keep that list of patients...
"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
-- Homer Simpson
Sorry, I just had to do it
Unfortunately, I think the way that the law goes, the comments will be published, but they will largely be summarized for the judge in the case. The judge doesn't even have to read the summary (from what I've heard, only Thomas Penfield Jackson has read the summary and comments in the past), but you're right about the comments being published.
If it turns out that the comments were not read by the judge, yet they were really good (as determined by people who read them in the Federal Register), I'm sure the case will take another interesting turn...
May as well post the comments I wrote back in December.. I never put them up anywhere -- I figured others would have much better comments than me. I'm sure there are, but the style I wrote mine in is different from what I've seen other post. Maybe some folks will get some new ideas..
Anyway, here it is
Heh, cool. I picked up a copy of the CVS version yesterday. I knew that as soon as I did that, a new version would come out..
;-)
I need this version, as it should have accelerated drivers for the Radeon Mobility chip that came in my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop.
I just wonder how long it'll take to whip up a Debian package for it
Hey, I just tried updating my system through Windows Update. I wasn't prompted for anything, and I haven't updated my NT 4 box for about a week. Does this mean that I already got the patch a week ago, or has Microsoft not put it on Windows Update yet?
If it's just not in Windows Update, shame on MS. That is the only place I go for updates. I don't waste my time wading through all of the other crap on MS's website.
/me strokes debian woody..